For everyone, a lot rides on Swami’s debate

That’s the PowerPoint distillation of the great Swami’s debate, myriad issues boiled down to a bumper sticker.

Only Encinitas, the Jerusalem of the surfing world, could be so deeply cleaved over hosting a pro women’s competition at what is commonly viewed as a sacred site, the Western Wall of fundamentalist wave riders.

To understand what’s going on here, you must understand this:

No mere mortal could even dream of holding a surfing contest at Swami’s, a fabled beach in the serene shadow of the Self-Realization Fellowship, the landmark meditation center at Highway 101’s southern gate to Old Encinitas.

So strong is the purist no-contest ethic at Swami’s, so protective is the culture of localism, that any flesh-and-blood promoter seeking a permit would be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a Hansen longboard.

The reality is, it would take a surfer of divine stature — Encinitas’ answer to Hawaii’s Duke Kahanamoku — to win over enough support from surfers and merchants to even apply for, let alone obtain, a special-event permit to hold the four-day Women’s Longboard Championship at Swami’s in October.

Enter Linda Benson, local Encinitas surfer girl who first rode Swami’s waves in 1956 when she was 12 and went on to win a long string of world and national championships.

How does Encinitas say no to this legend in a wet suit, Gidget gone gray?

The answer is … you can’t.

But that’s not to say that saying yes is going to be easy, either.

What might mystify many is why so many local surfers, all of whom (by all accounts) give Benson ardent props, feel so strongly about the sanctity of Swami’s that they would deny her dream.

At Wednesday night’s City Council meeting, Don Moriarty addressed the council in a passionate stream of consciousness, imploring the council not to open the door — others called it a Pandora’s box — to contests.

“I just feel that Swami’s is a beautiful, fragile place that we are fortunate enough to have in our city,” Moriarty said. “I think it defies description — and I’m trying to describe it — it defies description what Swami’s means to everyone, including Linda Benson and everybody in this room — but I don’t think any contest is right for Swami’s.”

Toward the end of his remarks, Moriarty conceded that Swami’s can be a crowded “zoo” but that each day has the possibility of being priceless.

“The four days that get taken out of the year — there’s less than 400 days in a year — there’s more than 1 percent of our year is going out to this surf contest and there’s just how many of those pretty days (when) you get to Swami’s and you see the people and you know everybody there and you see it all? Those are those sweet moments we all live for. That’s why we live in Encinitas. If we don’t have that we might as well move someplace else.”

In the end, Benson and her many supporters narrowly won a key battle Wednesday night.

After hearing from some 30 speakers, the slight majority of whom adamantly opposed a contest at Swami’s, the council voted 3-2 to allow Benson to work out logistical details for a venue for which the most charitable adjective would be “challenging” and the most pejorative would be “nightmarish.”

There’s no guarantee Benson can meet the city’s standards during the permit review. It’s theoretically possible that contest foes can appeal a permit to the council down the road.

Nevertheless, the council majority clearly gave her a green light.

Before its vote, the council heard a litany of practical, as opposed to spiritual, reasons to reject Benson’s dream.

Limited access for the handicapped: How can disabled spectators get to the beach? Would the city be vulnerable to ADA lawsuits?

Civil rights: Would other promoters yearning for the Swami’s vibe claim discrimination and sue the city? How do you limit Swami’s to one Benson contest a year?

Religious intolerance: Though the Self-Realization Fellowship said it’s possibly open to one contest a year (flexibility largely due to belief in Benson’s integrity), some surfers argued that a four-day contest and adjacent festival are incompatible with the retreat’s mission.

Traffic and parking: A contest and festival on nearby K Street would snarl 101 traffic and create unsafe conditions for spectators on foot. Other locations, including Cardiff, would offer better vehicle access, parking and safety, the contrary reasoning went. A shuttle from Moonlight Beach, as Benson has proposed, struck many as ill-conceived.

At the end of the day, however, no one argued that Swami’s typical wave was less than sublime, a saltwater Holy Grail.

No one argued that Benson would not have to move mountains — or, in this case, steep cliffs — to stage the event in such cramped quarters.

And no one argued that Benson wasn’t the ideal organizer, a goddess of her sport, the most admirable applicant in the universe.